The 77th Annual Tony Awards (American Theatre Wing, White Cherry Entertainment, CBS-TV, aired June 16, 2024)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2024 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night (Sunday, June 16) my husband Charles and I watched the 77th annual Tony Awards – the “Antoinette Perry Awards,” to use the full name (which almost no one ever does), after a pioneering actress and director (among other things, she helmed the premiere production of Preston Sturges’ Strictly Dishonorable on Broadway in 1929) who founded the American Theatre Wing in the early 1940’s. The American Theatre Wing operated the Stage Door Canteen to provide entertainment for servicemembers visiting New York City on their way to ship out to fight in World War II – the rule was the entertainers used the back door and the audience was strictly limited to, as the sign said, “Service Men Only” (one wonders what happened if any WAC’s or WAVES’s showed up) – and the organization that gives out the Tony Awards still has that name. The 77th annual Tony Awards were the usual lumbering beast most awards shows are, and as usual the highlights were the performances from the nominees for Best Musical. The Tony Awards are divided into “Plays” and “Musicals” – as if a musical isn’t also a play! – and for some reason David Adjmi’s Stereophonic was considered a “Play” rather than a “Musical” even though not only is it about music (it’s about a fictitious rock band based on Fleetwood Mac recording an album obviously meant to be Rumours), the actors playing the band members were auditioned not only for their acting ability but their musical skills as well. (They had to be able to play their instruments on stage.)

Stereophonic had an original score by Will Butler, former member of the indie rock band Arcade Fire (he left in 2022 on apparently amicable terms), and given that Arcade Fire was led by Will Butler’s brother Win Butler and featured Win’s wife, Régine Chassagne, Will was no doubt no stranger to the internal tensions of a band featuring both familial and romantic (or formerly romantic) partners. (One thing I hadn’t known until this morning was that the Butlers’ maternal grandfather was swing guitarist and bandleader Alvino Rey.) The show was hosted for the third year in a row by Ariana DuBose, and it featured so many African-Americans as presenters and awardees, one got the impression there’d been a quiet Black takeover of Broadway. Stereophonic won the award for Best Play and Will Brill won for Best Featured (i.e., “supporting”) Actor in a Play. Stereophonic also won for Best Direction (Daniel Aukin), Best Scenic Design (David Zinn), though all he had to do was build a set representing a recording studio (much the way Gandhi won the Academy Award for Best Costume Design, which had a lot of rival costume designers sniping, “Just how hard is it to design a loincloth?”) and Best Sound Design (Ryan Rumery). The Best Musical award went to The Outsiders, based on Sue Hinton’s 1967 young-adult novel of the same name about class-driven conflicts between two sets of teenagers, the “Greasers” and the “Soc’s” (pronounced “Soshes”), in mid-1960’s Tulsa, Oklahoma. Hinton published it as “S. E. Hinton” to conceal her true gender (like D. C. Fontana and J. K. Rowling), and the original publication made a big deal of the fact that it was “written by a teenager.” (Hinton was 16 when she wrote The Outsiders and she was in the audience last night as a heavy-set older woman.)

This was something of a disappointment for me since there were other musical nominees that seemed more interesting, including Water for Elephants (about characters who literally run away from home to join the circus); Hell’s Kitchen (based on songs by Alicia Keys and telling the story of her own teen years in Manhattan in the 1990’s); and the one I’d most like to see, Illinoise. Illinoise was represented on the telecast by a quite beautiful dance number featuring two couples, one straight and one Gay – and the Gay couple was a Black man and a white man. Illinoise won for Best Choreography (Justin Peck) and Water for Elephants didn’t win any awards, though the excerpt from it, “The Road Don’t Make You Young,” was one of the most powerful songs all night. Hell’s Kitchen won for Maleah Joi Moon as Best Actress in a Leading Role in a Musical and Kecia Lewis for Best Actress in a Featured Role in a Musical. The Outsiders also won for Dayna Taymor’s direction (she’s the daughter of Julie Taymor, who directed one of Broadway’s most legendary flops, Spider-Man: Turn Off the Dark), though the number performed from it last night was a gang fight staged as a dance number that led me to joke, “Well, somebody has seen West Side Story.” It also won Best Lighting Design of a Musical for Brian MacDevitt and Hana S. Kim. A musical version of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s classic novel The Great Gatsby won just one award – Linda Cho for Best Costume Design of a Musical – and because it wasn’t nominated for Best Musical it didn’t get a performance excerpt. That’s a real pity since I’ve loved that story since I read it in high school, and Gatsby made its Broadway debut in 1926 (just a year after Fitzgerald’s novel came out) in an adaptation by Owen Davis that starred James Rennie as Gatsby and was a major hit.

The winner for Best Revival of a Musical was for Stephen Sondheim’s Merrily We Roll Along, the last show on which he collaborated with director Hal Prince. It premiered in 1981 and was a dismal flop, as the George S. Kaufman play it was based on had been in 1934. That was generally attributed to its unusual structure; though the story was a standard-issue romantic triangle, it was told backwards, with the characters starting out middle-aged and disillusioned and ending up in their young, idealistic years. There were various attempts to tweak it, both before and after Sondheim’s death in 2021, and the current version became a surprise hit and won Best Revival, Best Leading Actor in a Musical for Jonathan Groff (who surprised no one by announcing that his work in theatre had given him the courage to come out as Gay at 23, 14 years ago) and Best Featured Actor in a Musical for Daniel “Harry Potter” Radcliffe. (Radcliffe introduced his wife and child when he accepted his award; the fact that he’s old enough to have a wife and child is yet another sign of how old I am.) It also won Best Orchestration for Sondheim’s original collaborator, Jonathan Tunick. I suspect the awards for Merrily We Roll Along were largely due to the fact that with Sondheim dead there aren’t going to be any new musicals from him, so the Tony voters grabbed their likely last chance to give him one final honor. I was sorry to see Merrily We Roll Along win for Best Revival of a Musical because I suspect that honor should have gone to Cabaret at the Kit Kat Club, which did win for Tom Scutt’s scenic design.

The show’s overall concept was to give the audience the impression that they were entering a real cabaret, not just an on-stage representation of one, and it featured Eddie Redmayne in Joel Grey’s old role as the M.C. in a quite good rendition of the opening number. I was a bit put off when they introduced Sally Bowles as a blonde, if only because I’ve got so used to seeing her as Liza Minnelli in the Louise Brooks-style black bob. (Minnelli got the idea for that hairdo from her dad, Vincente Minnelli; she was originally going to make herself resemble Marlene Dietrich but dad suggested she look for someone else from early-1930’s Germany.) The award for Best Revival of a Play went to something called Appropriate by Branden Jacobs-Jenkins, yet another African-American themed drama that, according to its Wikipedia page, “follows the dysfunctional Lafayette family as they return to a decaying plantation mansion in Arkansas to battle over their recently deceased father's inheritance. Soon after the discovery of a relic buried deep in the recess of their family’s past, decades of resentment burst through centuries of historical sin.” Appropriate also won Best Actress in a Leading Role in a Play for Sarah Paulson, and Best Lighting Design of a Play for Jane Cox. Though it was officially designated a revival, its original production was recent enough (2011) author Branden Jacobs-Jenkins was there last night. The Best Performance by a Leading Actor in a Play went to Jeremy Strong for Henrik Ibsen’s 1882 drama An Enemy of the People, about a doctor who warns the authorities of his town that the supposedly healing waters of their hot spring are dangerously polluted. Naturally Strong couldn’t help but note the modern-day parallels in his acceptance speech; though the awards show almost totally avoided major political statements, there were enough veiled hints as to where this artistic community in particular stands on the great social conflicts of the day.

The Best Performance by an Actress in a Featured Role in a Play went to Kara Young for yet another Black-themed play, awkwardly titled Purlie Victorious: A Non-Confederate Romp Through the Cotton Patch (I don’t know if that subtitle was part of Ossie Davis’s 1961 original play or it was added for the current revival), and the Best Costume Design of a Play went to Dede Ayite for still another Black play, Jaja’s African Hair Braiding. (She and the other woman who accepted were both adorned with magnificently braided hair, so they practiced what they preached.) Shaina Taub won two awards for her musical Suffs (short for “suffragists” or “suffragettes”), Best Book and Best Original Score (I was a bit disappointed by the latter because I’d have liked to see it go to Will Butler for Stereophonic), and the big number from Suffs, “Keep Marching,” was introduced by, of all people, Hillary Clinton. (Yes, that Hillary Clinton, looking almost mummified.) I was annoyed that “Keep Marching” featured a woman in a wheelchair – a modern-day wheelchair instead of the kind that would have existed in the era of women’s struggle for the vote, with the big wheels in front. The “In Memoriam” segment was introduced by, of all people, Brooke Shields, and accompanied by Nicole Schertzinger’s magnificent performance of “What I Did for Love” from A Chorus Line. There was also a nice medley of songs from the latest revival of the stage version of The Who’s rock opera Tommy, introduced by its composer, Pete Townshend, himself. Townshend accompanied on acoustic guitar and said before the medley that Tommy was about “parenting – good parenting and bad parenting.” This led me to joke, “Just what is there in Tommy that shows good parenting?” The show rather petered out when they gave Best Musical to The Outsiders and didn’t end with a big final production number the way the Grammy Awards usually do, but it was O.K. entertainment and the numbers from Illinoise and Water for Elephants were truly exalting.